11.15am There is Dragon’s Pen which is now fully booked. Good luck to those budding writers who have been brave enough to face the wrath of the fire-breathing she-dragons.

1.30-5.30pm Saturday afternoon sees the exciting announcement of the winners of the festival short story competition by London Short Story winner, Judge Joanna Campbell, who will then talk about her own short story success and latest novel.

This is followed by the very interesting and dramatic Orphans in Fiction with author Antonia Honeywell, and Doctoral Researcher Rosie Canning.

Lindsay Bamfield will be interviewing the extremely knowledgeable author, Sunny Singh, who will talk about all things writing.

Our final Saturday event takes us to India for the adventures of Inspector Chopra and his assistant, the capable baby elephant. Beware of elephants in Finchley! These wonderful characters will be joined by their creator, author Vaseem Khan.

There will be refreshments available at Trinity Church Centre during the festival.

Sunday 11am, we head to Waterstones Finchley, to meet the inspiring KatharineNorbury whose memoir ‘The Fish Ladder’, has been published to critical acclaim. Observer Rising Star 2015,Telegraph Best Book Of The Year 2015, Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2015, and Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2016.

Adopted as a baby, life changing events send Katharine on an unforgettable journey from sea to the source of various rivers. Fans of ‘H is for Hawk’ will especially enjoy this event.

This event is followed by a walk with lunch and afternoon tea stops and wonderful Finchley in Fiction literary readings. Meet Waterstones Finchley 12midday.

Christine Anne Cole’s working life as a librarian spanned all parts of the profession. It was in the media where she learned to manage staff and multi-media resources for customers researching under the discipline of “deadline” as well as hone her writing skills, alongside from journalist friends.

A graduate of the University of Kent, Canterbury UK, she worked in old-established provincial newspapers as well as BBC television, joining the profession at a time of technological change. She helped co-found a new professional association to deal with the digital issues of the day, advised by the distinguished News Librarian and Alumna from America, Barbara Semonche, who visited Christine at her news library in Northampton, UK.

Christine’s later appointment as Information Manager (Italy) for the British Council based in Rome in the nineties meant arranging conferences and “outreach” in different parts of Italy, supervising the Council’s four traditional English language lending libraries, organising trade fairs for British firms, as well as managing the British Library’s Document Supply Agency to its many Italian customers.

Throughout her career Christine published articles in newspapers and magazines as a freelance writer. In fact, she has been scribbling and writing stories all her life and loves the research behind a character, especially within an historical background. She especially likes writing fiction for women, featuring on their emotional and professional lives. She enjoys travel and has lived in Egypt, Germany, Italy and France. She recently enjoyed a brief stay with the Ngadjerri people of South Australia.

Christine is now retired and lives in a Northamptonshire village in England. She has two daughters both engaged in their own professions and five grandchildren spread between England and Australia.

It was, the school administration assured us students, a new idea: combining American history and English into one course, which would focus on The Civil War. At an old New England boarding school there was no War Between the States and certainly no War of Northern Succession. Yankee all the way.

By then, Junior year, I was an avid reader and a lover of history. This new eleventh year English course was designed in my personal heaven. And let there be no question, the results lived up to my expectations.

That high school English course changed my perspective on literature, and on the interplay of history and novels. I loved the way authors could interweave real events with their fictional characters. The more true to history the events were, the surer I was that this was great writing.

But, I had conflicted feelings because there was another body of literature that I also loved, what I call fiction from history, the contemporary fiction from times before I was alive. These wonderful books transported me to those times and made them real. Perhaps best typified by Dickens, who brought to life the pain and poverty of the English masses, by Steinbeck, who dragged my soul through the suffering of the great depression, by Fitzgerald who helped me live the wild abandon of the roaring twenties, and by Conrad, who carried me into the darkness of not just Africa but colonialism as well. These great writers didn’t focus on real events; rather they focused on creating the climate in which those events happened. Of course, these great writers were not setting their stories in history; they were writing about the world around them.

These were powerful novels from history captured the human condition. They rose above the immediacy of the world in which they were written to become timeless. The reader of today who reads this books is suspended beyond time. That suspension of the fourth dimension is perhaps best recognized by Vonnegut, whose masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five” begins grounded in an historical event only to end in a paean to post traumatic stress disorder and the inability of Billy Pilgrim to escape the loop of experience which has neither beginning nor end.

Today’s Author Spotlight, the four hundred and first, is of poet and non-fiction author Nina Bingham. If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at author-spotlights.

Nina Bingham is an Author, Life Coach, and Clinical Hypnotherapist. Inspiring, sincere and whole-hearted, she educates not only from her academic knowledge, but shares from her own hard-won life experience in a new and profound way. In private practice since 2003, she has treated individuals and couples with a wide variety of mental health issues. She is the author of three books of poetry and one recovery workbook, Never Enough. Her fifth book, “Once The Storm Is Over: From Grieving to Healing After The Suicide of My Daughter”, came out last month, February 2015.

It’s the autobiographical confession of a counselor who lost her teen daughter to suicide. Once the Storm is Over chronicles Nina’s descent into grief after the suicide of her daughter. For a year she tormented herself, wondering how she had missed the signs. Finally she came to understand that her daughter, like many, many teens, was adept at hiding her deepest emotions – fear of seeming weak or “crazy” kept her daughter from sharing her distress. Nina says that releasing her guilt was a huge part of her healing process.

Nina’s goal is to get copies of the book not only to teens in crisis, but to parents dealing with the depression and guilt that follows the suicide of a child. As most of us know, teen suicide is becoming epidemic. Every 13.3 minutes someone in the U.S. commits suicide, making it the #1 cause of accidental death for Americans, surpassing car accidents for the first time in 2012. We’ve all had books that influenced us, or changed us entirely. Nina would like Once the Storm is Over to be that book for the people who need it most.

The Widest Range of Publishing Options Ever Available to Authors – But Who’s Going to Do the Marketing? by Andrew Crofts

Once upon a time there was really only one publishing option. If you couldn’t persuade a traditional publisher to make you an offer you pretty much had to give up on ever seeing your work move beyond manuscript stage. There was the possibility of “vanity publishing”, as self-publishing was known then, but the costs were exorbitant and without the internet it was virtually impossible to distribute and sell the resulting books beyond your own family circle.

Now however it is all different – up to a point.

As we speak, I am in the process of publishing several different books, one with the very traditional HarperCollins – (“Secret Child”, which I wrote with Gordon Lewis about his childhood in a home for single mothers in Dublin in the Fifties) – one with the selective, bespoke publisher Red Door – (“Chances”, an erotic love story which I ghosted for the author known only as “Penny”) – and one with Thistle Publishing, the enormously successful imprint run by literary agents Andrew Lownie and David Haviland, (“Pretty Little Packages” a novel about people-trafficking and modern slavery which was first published in 2001 under the title “Maisie’s Amazing Maids”, cover below).

The most obvious difference is in the offices they all inhabit. HarperCollins, being part of one of the biggest media corporations in the world, has just moved to a Thames-side tower block beside the Shard. The hushed, open-plan offices seem to stretch forever, merging into the view across the city below. Hundreds of young publishing people move silently amongst the white desks and glass meeting pods. Red Door, by contrast, happens in a converted barn behind the founder’s house. Clare Christian, who first set up and then sold The Friday Project, lives down the end of a seemingly ever-lasting lane, her family farm nestling beneath the picturesque South Downs. Meanwhile Thistle Publishing happens in Andrew Lownie’s elegant town house in a Dickensian street behind Westminster Abbey, from which he has been operating his extraordinarily successful literary agency for many years.

The first thought that occurs to me, therefore, is how many more books have to be sold to support a giant glass edifice beside the Thames than are needed to give a good living to a publisher or agent who works from home. I’ve published many books with HarperCollins however, and know that when they have their eye on the ball they are able to shift cartloads of the things into supermarkets around the country virtually overnight. The editors and publicity people who populate the shiny new glass pods are all as smart and market savvy as you would expect of employees of possibly the most voracious corporate titan in the world, but will they have time to concentrate on Secret Child when they have so many other books coming out at the same time?

So if all three can edit and design beautiful books, it all comes down to marketing muscle and public relations guile. Andrew Lownie and David Haviland, being agents, are both seasoned sales people who understand the publishing industry from grass roots upwards, including the absolute necessity to generate real sales if an author is to earn a living. Clare Christian worked at Hodder before she set out to build her own companies and is equally in touch with the realities of the marketplace.

Today’s guest blog post, on the topic of writing a family biography, is brought to you by non-fiction writer (of memoir and wine) and diplomatic mystery novelist William S Shepard.

Writing History

Mousson Hill billet

A treasured family possession is my father’s notebook from World War One. He enlisted in the Signal Corps, U.S. Army, was on a July 1918 convoy to Great Britain from Halifax, and spent several months being assigned ever farther east until reaching his front line position in the American Sector at Mousson Hill, Meurthe-et-Moselle (Lorraine). The one date from his notebook that all the family knew was his entry for Armistice Day, as he described intercepting messages from both sides, and finally, the guns falling silent. But with the centennial approaching, perhaps it was time to look at the entire notebook, and see what it contained.

Let me interject that whoever spoke of the past as a different place was quite right. One needs a guide, for 1918 was a different world, and certainly, a different series of battles, than I had understood it to be. When that is understood, then the past can be unearthed on its own terms, not as we would have it. It took a number of stages before this notebook could be understood, let alone be published. Here are some of them.

Like giving up smoking, the essential first step is the determination to transcribe the notebook. It will fight you for weeks, pencil writings sometimes but not always done over in pen and ink. Small victories take place, and will be encouraging – when the writer’s slang or shorthand becomes familiar, for example. It also helped a great deal that I have lived in France, and understood many of father’s references. But the important thing at this early stage, having made the decision to transcribe the notebook, is – like ceasing to smoke – keeping at it through the inevitable difficulties.

Dad in truck with buddies

There are allies, I discovered, as the work proceeds. An offhand reference to a fire at Halifax, for example, led me to google “Halifax fire”, and discover the cataclysmic explosion and fire that occurred in Halifax harbor in December 1917 – said to be the largest manmade explosion before the development of atomic weapons. Dad was transported across the North Atlantic in a 23-ship convoy, in the HMT Durham Castle, and I was able to find a period photograph of that very ship. Little by little, I had moved beyond transcribing, and was adding details that enriched the text for today’s reader – details that someone from 1918 would already have known, perhaps.

I did a lot of reading to get some context for the notebook. One recent author of a Doughboy history struck me as quite right, when he said that he had decided to write about officers, because enlisted men left out so many details, probably for security reasons, that officers included in their diaries or notebooks. That was quite true in my father’s case as well. However, some 55 years later, while recuperating from a heart attack, he reread his notebook and dictated several memoranda, adding details and depth. I then had this material as well, and included it with the notebook entries at the right dates. I also included information on Father’s whereabouts for each day, which became of particular interest when he and his Signal Corps company moved to the front.

Complementing my interviews, today’s Author Spotlight, the three hundred and eighty-ninth, is of mystery novelist John J Hohn. If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at author-spotlights.

John J. Hohn is the author of Deadly Portfolio: A Killing in Hedge Funds, a five star mystery, 2011, As I Was Passing By, a collection of poems, 2000, and most recently Breached, sequel to Deadly Portfolio.

He contributes to various web sites dedicated to writing and publishing. His own website, www.jjhohn.com, features articles on a wide range of topics including book and drama reviews, autobiographical sketches, financial planning, and civil rights.

Born and raised in Yankton, South Dakota, USA, John graduated from St. John’s University in 1961 with a degree in English.

He is the father of four sons and a daughter, a stepfather to a son, and has resided in North Carolina since 1978.

He and his wife Melinda divide their time each year between their cottage in the village of Southport NC at the mouth of the Cape Fear River and a cabin near West Jefferson, NC.